Medal of Honor Airborne

We're not pinning any ribbons on in this review.

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It takes a better-than-average effort for a WWII shooter to even get noticed anymore. Such is the state of things for a genre that has both delivered amazingly immersive cinematic experiences but has also taken gamers back to some battles so many times that the names of obscure French villages sound familiar. More often than not, discussions of WWII-era overload come back to the Medal of Honor series. Medal of Honor: Airborne makes a solid first impression, enough so that it avoids the passing dismissal given to previous games in the franchise.

Obviously, much of this stems from the eye-catching visuals courtesy of Unreal Engine 3 (UE3). But not all UE3 games are created equal, and the development team at EA's Los Angeles studio clearly put a good deal of work into creating the art necessary to take full advantage of the engine's potential. Details, such as discernable pieces of gear hanging on a soldier's uniform that look solid and not like a flat, pasted-on decal and piles of rubble with individual bits of debris in them, create a very believable experience. If not before then, the game's second mission, which drops you into the war-torn Nijmegen as part of the infamous Operation Market Garden (the second level of the game), surely draws you in past that point of consciously thinking about playing a game with its battered brick buildings and shutters dangling from windows here and there.

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Creative level design also goes a long way toward helping get you into that state. Embracing the idea of casting you as a paratrooper, MOH: Airborne dispenses with the usual linear level design. Instead, at the beginning of each mission, you drop into an operation area. Once on the ground, you know from your briefing what needs to be done, but you chose in what order to tackle these tasks. This creates a very dynamic sense of being in an ongoing battle. For their part, your squadmates do an admirable job of figuring out your intentions and supporting your attack.

But all that work then goes for naught the minute bullets start flying. Whether under the guise of modeling real-world weapon accuracy or not, no excuse rationalizes repeated misses with scoped-in headshots from a sniper rifle. Likewise, nothing explains how short, tight bursts from a machine gun at close range sometimes cause no damage. And if part of it does involve simulating the spread from real gunfire, then there needs to be more feedback both in the aiming cursor (to give you some idea where your shots will go) and in the environment (so you can see where they hit and adjust accordingly). Making matters doubly worse, none of these issues seem to impact the enemies. The A.I. in the game mows you down with ruthless autoaim efficiency. It also apparently gets to ignore the range component of every weapon, because while you try and line up that 100-yard sniper shot, it will mow you down with wild submachine gun spray.

If any lingering doubts remained, whatever notion of realism the designers initially intended goes up in smoke as the single-player campaign winds to its conclusion. First you encounter enemies firing Panzerschreck antitank weapons at you because, well...every shooter since Quake has to have rocket soldiers, right? And of course, what Nazi-infested shooter would be complete without the obligatory freakish supersoldiers wearing ominous full-length black trench coats, who with their hand-carried MG42's can end your life in the blink of an eye?

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Multiplayer manages to salvage some of the promise the first few minutes of the game held. With everyone on a level playing field as far as the weapons go, the suite of tried-and-true modes stand on their own pretty well. And they get a unique twist with the spawning system that has the Allied side gaining the mobility advantage by parachuting in from above, while the Axis, spawning normally on the ground, can try and shoot the Allies out of the sky as they come down. This makes the Objective Airborne mode, where a team must simultaneously hold three control flags to achieve victory, particularly chaotic as the Allies can quickly switch their assault from one position to another as they respawn.

That might make this a nice tune-up for some while waiting for the upcoming multiplayer heavyweights soon to be released, but it comes up well short of redeeming the misguided single-player campaign.